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Thursday, July 06, 2006

Peggy Noonan, such a deep thinker, compassionate human, and great writer put it to us -- that Kenneth Lay died of a broken heart. The gist of her article was that we are all human, we make mistakes, we all need a second chance (a 5th, a 100th), and that that is no longer possible in today's world.

There is no place to run, no place to hide.

Someone said to me what a travesty it was that he never served time, "and all those people lost their money." Goodness. Is death not a high enough price to pay?

Of course being in the field of emotional intelligence (EQ), what I first thought of when I read about Lay was stress cardiomyopathy -- a syndrome commonly called "Broken Heart Syndrome," which occurs after a shock, loss, or tragedy. Individuals show up in the ER with all the symptoms of a heart attack, though there is no former heart pathology. They recover without effect.

Lay, evidently, had heart disease before, according to the autopsy. And his stress was long-term, chronic.

Our emotions do effect our health. There is, in reality, no mind-body split. 5 minutes of anger can suppress the immune system for up to 6 hours, and our immune system is our health.

For reasons hopefully not as extreme or anti-social as Lay's, we often have to reinvent ourselves during our lifetimes. While we can't run, and can't hide, we can lose major sources of our identity -- a spouse or a child dies, we lose our career, or retire. We feel "lost."